Russia’s Shadow War on Georgia, WikiLeaked

The brief shooting war between Russia and Georgia in 2008 was just the final, action-packed scene of a years-long drama. As the U.S. Embassy in the Georgian capitol of Tblisi saw it, Moscow spent much of the previous decade destabilizing the former Soviet republic, using “missile attacks and murder plots,” natural-gas “sabotage” and support to Georgian separatists.

That’s according to a WikiLeaked 2007 cable written by the U.S. ambassador to Georgia, John F. Tefft, discovered by Danger Room pal Eli Lake of the Washington Times. One example Tefft cites: a 2007 helicopter and missile strike on Georgian military positions in the breakaway region of Abkhazia. A United Nations investigation suggested but didn’t confirm Russian involvement, partly because the Russians didn’t cooperate with the inquiry. Tefft writes that there’s little doubt: “U.N. investigators have told us privately… that only Russia could have launched the attack.”

That was the most overt case of Russian involvement. Sponsoring the separatists in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Russia undertook a campaign of assassinations of Georgian officials and general “sabotage.” Russian operatives allegedly tried to kill Georgian opposition politician Koba Davitashvili, monitoring his home and shooting at him with a silencer-equipped gun. Relying heavily on hardly-unbiased Georgian accounts, Tefft cabled home that a Russian military intelligence officer named Anatoly Sinitsyn “masterminded” a February 2005 bombing on a Georgian police station near South Ossetia. Several prominent advisers to the separatist movement in South Ossetia are said to be “Russian officials — in most cases believed to be FSB,” a reference to the KGB’s successor. And the Russians supposedly smuggled Grad artillery rockets into South Ossetia, as well as other unspecified “arms and equipment.”

Tefft also credits Georgian claims that the Russians “sabotaged” a natural gas pipeline in their territory that supplied crucial energy into Georgia, plunging Georgia into “a major energy crisis” in the frigid January of 2006. Georgia didn’t believe that the Russians were the victim of a terrorist attack, as Moscow claimed, and neither did Tefft. “The gas magically resumed just as Armenia — which receives its gas through Georgia — was about to exhaust its reserves,” the ambassador wrote.”

The New York Times takes a more skeptical view of what the U.S. embassy in Tblisi reported. Other cables released by WikiLeaks and reviewed by the paper show credulity about Georgian accounts of key events, including a Georgian artillery attack on South Ossetia that touched off the 2008 Russia-Georgia war. “Saakashvili has said that Georgia had no intention of getting into this fight,” reads a contemporaneous cable cited by the Times, “but was provoked by the South Ossetians and had to respond to protect Georgian citizens and territory.” But as the Times notes, European observers in South Ossetia didn’t report any provocations from the separatists. The paper’s C.J. Chivers writes that the embassy’s reliance on Georgia for information on the region indicates “some of the perils of a close relationship.”

A spokesman for the Russian embassy in Washington told Lake that the allegations of Russian covert action against Georgia are unproven, but declined to discuss the cable.